Flog a Pro: would you pay to turn the first page of this bestseller?

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

This novel was number one on the New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list for May 14, 2017. How strong is the opening page—would this narrative, all on its own, have hooked an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.

There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been (snip)

Was this opening page compelling to you? If it was, you can turn the page here (the Kindle version is free to Amazon Prime members). My votes and notes after the fold.

I suspect some of you will have recognized The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Recently, in comments to Flog a Pro, readers suggested looking outside the tight confines of a NYT bestseller list that is dominated by thrillers to look at other genres. Another thing to note: frequently WU readers speak of or cite stories from other eras as examples of the way it ought to be done. Well, The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1986. So how did its thirty-year-old opening hold up to the first-page test? Was it compelling to you?

My vote: yes.

This classic received an average review rating of 4.2 stars out of 5 on Amazon. I said yes, though it was a little shaky. The opening paragraph does a fascinating job of letting us know that this story takes place in the future by starting with a past that is gone. The later narrative increases tension by raising a story question—what is going on here? But the narrative didn’t engage me with a character. For me, the focus on a sense of nostalgia distanced me from the “now” of this person’s life. But, still, the writing, the voice, and a sense of things to come was enough.

But . . . but I think it could have been stronger. Please indulge me and my quest for strong opening pages. While this one has many things going for it, and it will appeal to readers with a more literary bent, I suspect that it fails for many like me who want to see something happening. As it turns out, this story has that, but just not on the first page.

I submit that if perhaps some of that long, moody opening paragraph were shifted to a little later, or if there were other trims, Ms. Atwood would have been better served in crafting a compelling opening page if these lines had been included:

The lights were turned down but not out. Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts.

Now that I think about it, those lines could have made a terrific opening-line hook that led to the more literary setup. Would an addition of this somewhere in the narrative have significantly elevated the tension of the first page for you? It would have for me. It adds a sense of jeopardy, of trouble ahead, that not only piques my interest but brings me closer to connecting with the protagonist.

Your thoughts?

Flogging the Indie side: you’re invited to walk a little on the Indie side most every Monday, when I flog an author who has offered their novel free on BookBub. Just visit Flogging the Quill. You get to vote on turning the page and whether or not the author should have hired an editor. I occasionally find a gem that’s free, so it might be worth your time.

Wish you could buy this author a cup of joe?

Ray Rhamey is the author of four novels and one writing craft book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. He's also an editor of book-length fiction and designs book covers and interiors for Indie authors and small presses. His website, crrreative.com, offers an a la carte menu of creative services for writers and publishers. Learn more about Ray's books at rayrhamey.com.

Comments

I really enjoyed the beginning and Yes! would have paid to read the next page. However, I was thrown for a loop when you proclaimed the book in question. I haven’t read it nor did I scroll down to find out what author’s book was up for analysis. To be honest, I thought it was a sports story or the setup for a reminiscence/ romantic story like The Notebook. Now that I know, I’d pay $15 to read the entire thing.

I vote Yes to turning the page, but I don’t know if your suggested changes would help. There is a point when the author describes ‘of something without a shape or name’ and that disconnect from hard definition subtly let me know something was off about the narrator. The next line says it is a yearning, and the last paragraph described it as ‘that talent for insatiability’. I call it a loss of youth, when the promise of the future is remembered as the best thing about the past.

That hard to describe feeling might be lost if we already know about the cattle prods and are focusing on that.

I know that some of this is personal preference for genre/style, but the contrast between this and the sort of thing you frequently post here is stunning. Many of those other works feel rushed, forced even, as authors really try to grab your attention. Atwood’s first line tells you something is very wrong–you generally don’t have people sleeping in a gymnasium unless something is very wrong–and then lets things unfold, gracefully. I also really like the suggestion of scent that calls up bittersweet memories.

I also agree with James above; forcing in the cattle-prod wearing sisters would push things too much. We already know something is wrong, let’s sink rather than cannonball down into it.

I voted yes. And like jeffo pointed out, WOW, what a difference from the current best-sellers you’ve flogged in recent posts. It’s so nice to see a writer putting some work into the actual writing for a change!

It gets a bit florid, I admit, but I’m still intrigued by the imagery. I’d definitely turn the page.

I’m in the yes camp (although I have not yet read The Handmaid’s Tale, I’m certainly aware of it generally but had not read the opening pages and therefore did not recognize them). What grabs me: the sense of menace; the sensory evocations of nostalgia (ah, those HS BB games and dances, to which we can all relate); the message that life has changed, the message that the change may be global (this heightens the menace) but in ways that promise to be defined in good time. I agree with others that including the aunts and their cattle prods at this stage would interfere with the mood of this carefully laid scene. There’s already enough tension to keep me reading — not to mention the marvelous writing.

We could think of this as an inactive, backward-looking opening, but I think that misses its genius.

“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”

The first line tells us that something is different. That’s a prime requirement of speculative fiction but is important in any novel. The plot gets underway when change is underway.

“A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. ”

Intimate narration conveys not the dry and objective way that things look, but the narrator’s experience of things. Here, the narrator is a woman. The gym reminds her not of basketball contests but of the girls who watched them. Girls who could dress as they pleased. Chew gum. Focus on boys. That lost world, to this narrator, is the lost world of feminine freedom.

“There was old sex in the room .. I remember that yearning,”

What does the narrator want? What is driving her? She longs for the sexual drive that is natural in every human, but which, as we are beginning to sense, is now greatly suppressed.

Notice the word “yearning” in that passage? It occurs again…

“We yearned for the future.”

…which means, by implication, that currently the narrator yearns for the past. What exactly the narrator years for matters less, I think, than that the narrator yearns at all. We feel it. We are engaged.

Nothing is happening but we care what will happen because the narrator cares, which comes through powerfully in the rich details and in her evident yearning for things which are universal and human. We all yearn. We are all Offred.

I voted yes, and I really felt like someone came and took me by the hand and led me into the story. I think there’s something big to be said for that, and it reminded me of an opening of a Hayao Miyazaki film. Miyazaki sets up his openings like this and it’s probably why I’m in love with any film he creates.

This opening felt like steady ripples of water with wild undercurrents.

Also, with the second paragraph, that’s the moment I decided I definitely wanted to keep reading. Why has their yearning for life been stripped away? Yes please! Looks like The Handmaid’s Tale is next up on my list to read. Thanks for sharing, Ray!

I might have tightened Atwood’s opening a little. The reference to painted stripes and circles didn’t add anything for me. The rest of the opening is pretty tight, despite the loopy and grammatically strange second sentence. The reader doesn’t get the point of the narrator’s longing remembrance of how girls used to dress (felt-skirted, mini-skirted, pantsed), but it foreshadows the oppressive costuming of women later. The lingering contemplation of sex, too, as something consensual and yearning, contrasts with the horrors to come.

I am watching The Handmaid’s Tale and I read it years ago, but didn’t recognize the opening. I voted a big “yes.” It pulled me in with the feelings it elicited, even though we don’t know anything about what’s actually happening. I need to reread Atwood’s classic.

Second comment: not on the pages but on the management of this site: I read this early and noticed a commenter who advised including the cattle prods much earlier. Some, including me, noted that the cattle prods would have not been appropriate to this beginning. Now I see that the original comment advising cattle prods no longer appears. Was it suppressed? If so, I am very much disappointed in WU, which I have always believed in as a forum for a rich array of diverse opinions. Can it be restored? Although the cattle-prod suggestion was strongly expressed, there was nothing offensive about it. WU admin, what gives?

I’ll be lynched by my literary friends for saying this, but no, I wouldn’t turn the page of my own volition. I did make myself turn the page once, many years ago, because this is a classic and everyone loves it, but I couldn’t force myself to keep turning them for very long.

I don’t need books to explode out of the gate with laser sword fights, but static descriptions of settings put me to sleep. I get bored even if the words are poetic, even if the setting is symbolic, even if the passage sets the tone of the novel. My attention was wandering by the second sentence.

Most importantly, I have no idea what’s going on, and it’s clear the author will take a long time to tell me exactly what this book is about. All I see on this page is a woman in some sort of emergency relief situation, describing a boring place at length and romanticizing the backseat fumblings of her high school years.

This book is on the bestseller list because it’s being dramatized on Netflix, but it was originally published in 1985 when slow starters were acceptable. Also, this was Atwood’s sixth book, and she was already famous. The National Film Board of Canada made a documentary about her a full year before The Handmaid’s Tale hit the shelves.

If this were instead a writing sample pasted in the query emails of a newbie in 2017, I expect those emails would be met with 50% silence and 50% form rejections. We can admire this work as a classic, but we couldn’t get away with emulating it.

Yes, but I’m a cheater. I read it ages ago, in college, and I’m used to this sort of thing having slogged through many a long novel with nary a human in site for miles. I agree with others in that the gymnasium in the first line says far more than a bit of action would.

That said, I’d pull a few comms as well as the word “palimpsest.” That word makes me grouchy; it’s overused these days or in certain circles/eras. You do make a good point, though, in that jumping into the action straight off is so often advised or desired.

This didn’t pass the first page test. Overwrought narrative doesn’t work for me. The story concept might’ve made me buy the book, but not this first page. Those opening lines about the aunts holding cattle prods would’ve jarred me and at the same time kept me riveted, wanting more. To me, a glut of narrtive in one place is lazy writing. It’s far more skillful and tighter writing to weave choice description and emotion throughout the opening pages.

Ray– Like T.K.Marnell, I don’t require hard-charging, action-oriented openings. In fact, they’ve been taught and required for so long of writers that I resist them. I usually sense conscious manipulation with such grab-the-reader-by-the-shorthairs openings. I like the first sentence a lot. As Donald Maass says, it alludes to something different and changed, the re-purposing of what was once a gym. But then come the clunky second and third sentences. The gym’s varnished wood floor has stripes and circles painted on it, “for the games that were formerly played there….” Really? That’s what the stripes and circles are for? Why tell the reader–any reader–what she already knows? Then we’re told a balcony runs around the room “for the spectators.” Again, this kind of unnecessary detail raises questions for me. Who else would a balcony be for in a gym? I believe a careful writer would edit out such unnecessary detail.

I hear you! I also didn’t care for “the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone.” I know it’s easy to play editor, but still…for literary fiction, attention to detail and word use is paramount, right? I’d have shortened it to “the basketball hoops were still in place, though the nets were gone” to make it cleaner…but then, that’s just a style issue. I also shirked from “smelling” an “afterimage” (?? How the hell does that happen? Does my nose grow olfactory eyeballs or something in this new gymnastic world?) and the “sweet taint” of chewing gum, which to me is just weird and frankly OTT. In fact, there were several clues as to why this book would not be to my taste, but then again…none of them necessarily belong to Ray’s criteria. I’m all for moody openings, but I wasn’t particularly grabbed by this one. The second paragraph was confusing and had way too much laundry-list-gorgeous-odd-selfconscious-image stuff going on, which only added to my non-interest. Thank goodness Atwood is a famous writer who doesn’t give two cents for my opinion, otherwise I’d feel a little guilty for being so harsh! But I guess the real question is whether or not to use the Flog criteria for literary fiction, which obviously has a different audience that is coached to look for a different set of first-page clues when determining whether or not they will enjoy a certain piece. The clues on this first page clearly indicated to me that I would not enjoy it, but that doesn’t mean anything other than I’m not the intended audience…

I was at a conference once that shall remain unnamed as shall parties, but the mods slipped this in to an idol workshop. Three literary agents didn’t recognize it in the midst of the other openings and “gonged” it. That ought to tell you something. They said later that it just goes to show how subjective rejections are, so never give up.

It would be a tougher sell today, I think.

I probably would keep reading because it promises to be a navel gazer from the opening page.

I don’t think Ray’s addition helps. That’s just completely over the top, but a subtle hint of the skewed world or even just less of the past normalcy might be better.

A couple of days ago The Philosopher’s Stone was mentioned. Everything was normal, normal, normal, thank you very much. And you knew right there things were fixing to get un-normal. It had the same kind of opening, just less.

Of course, this is literary and that is MG, but good writing is good writing.

I was hooked right up through “…spiky green-streaked hair” and then I was gone. I got the setup. Would have been much more intrigued with something in the present, at that point, instead of what amounted to beating a dead horse. I didn’t recognize it and I voted no. Was very surprised to see what it was. Books 30 years ago could take their time and if I was on vacation maybe I would have continued but today? No time.

I was immediately drawn into the narrative and could picture everything. Funny that I don’t remember this from reading the book long ago.

What I thought of was the family I knew who lived in an old school gymnasium. There were six kids and they loved it — all this space to play!!! And upstairs there were rows of rooms for bedrooms that looked out into the gym. I’ve always wanted to write about a family in that setting so thank you for prodding that out of my memory banks Ray.

A resounding yes from me. I read the book a long time ago and am watching the series now, but I didn’t recall the opening.

The sense of foreboding is extraordinary. Questions open right from the start, it used to be gym? What is it now? The details only add to the foreboding. It’s ghostly, as though those old images, those old smells and sights and sounds are haunting the place.

I didn’t get the sense of ‘overwrought’ or too much info at all. But then, I’m a fan of lit fic and that may have something to do with it. Overdetail, to my mind is when details that are unimportant to the story are added. If you look here carefully, there isn’t a single detail that doesn’t serve that overall sense of things have changed, and the changes aren’t good, that you get from the first line. “A balcony around the room, for the spectators” does double duty. The spectators then? Are they watching you still? Who is watching? There is a sense of longing in the air, and still in the air, the suggestion that it’s so strong they can’t sleep. What an opening need do is set the tone, give us some questions, make us feel like we have stepped into the story world. This opening does all of those things enviably well.

Ute, the spectators got me too: long-ago spectators of basketball and volleyball games, or spectators in the present–spies? wardens? voyeurs? I felt the creepy-crawlies immediately from this sense of being watched.

I voted no, then was shocked to find out what the book was. Must confess I have never read it. I think the style is of its time – these days readers have less patience with passages like this opening. And as writers we keep being urged to start with that hook. For me, it wasn’t there. The passage felt over-written. There, I’ve said it. Feels like daring to critique Shakespeare.

I voted ‘yes’, and about 25 years ago I did keep reading. Funny though, like Vijaya , I didn’t recognize this at first, but when I got to the army cots I was pretty sure this was something I’d already read.

After learning it was the beginning of a story I’d not only read but liked, I spent the next thirty minutes or so staring at the books on the shelves nearest my desk, trying to remember their opening lines. These are some of my favorite books, stories I know well, and yet I remember little or nothing specific about their opening lines: bel canto–no idea, The Madonnas of Leningrad–no idea, The Secret Life of Bees–no idea, A Walk in the Woods–no idea, (and Bill Bryson is one of my favorite writers), The Time Traveler’s Wife–no idea, The Lovely Bones–no idea, The Da Vinci Code–no idea, Under the Tuscan Sun–no idea (and I’ve read it twice), The Left Hand of Darkness–no idea, Exodus–no idea, Water for Elephants–no idea , etc. I know generally how these stories begin, but don’t remember much, if anything, about their opening lines: To Kill a Mockingbird begins with Scout musing about her brother’s broken arm; Under the Tuscan Sun begins with Mayes buying Bramsasole, etc., but the specific words that lured me in and kept me reading I don’t remember.

Maybe it’s my age causing my short-term memory to falter, but thinking about it now, it seems the only openings I can recall verbatim, or nearly verbatim, are the classic and/or quirky: “Call me Ishmael”, “It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen”, “Happy families are all alike….”, “It was a pleasure to burn”, “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it”, “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”, etc.

I know the opening is essential to entice the reader to keep reading, but looking at all these books I’ve enjoyed and yet have still forgotten their opening lines, I’m wondering if they warrant all the time and effort put into them. Or, maybe I’m just trying to rationalize a way out of my ongoing battles with the first lines of my own stories.

My vote was “NO”. I had no character – nor hint of character – on which to hang my curiosity. The nostalgia works for a graph or two, but unless I have some semblance of who is speaking, I lose interest very rapidly.

This could have been helped very simply by a parenthetical definition of the opening “we”. And it probably would have changed my vote. For me, the character is the thing, next the plot, and finally the details.

Judith, I think the focus here at WU needs to remain on the pros. However, I offer the same “flogging” on my blog, Flogging the Quill–scroll down to see examples of critiques and how to submit. My readers also often give very helpful comments. Visit http://www.floggingthequill.com and check it out. Your submission will be very welcome, and you’ll get fresh eyes.